Chapter 68 The Birth of a Legend
For a long minute, no one in the arena moved. The air still crackled and the echo of impossible lightning. The Marquess, Marquess Valerius, stood frozen on his platform, the phantom chill of the cloud's gaze still icing his spine.
His carefully ordered world, built on the unshakeable pillars of title, wealth, and cruel leverage, had just been punched through by forces that did not acknowledge any of them.
He blinked, the world snapping back into a focus that felt cheap and fragile.
The immediate, mortal danger was gone, but in its wake swirled a torrent of disastrous consequences. He was not a man who often felt fear, but as his eyes swept over the thousands of faces in the stands.Nobles, merchants, guards and fighters , he felt a new insidious chill.
They all saw. Every last one of them. They saw the cloud speak. They saw the beast materialize at his shoulder. They saw him, Marquess Valerius, reduced to a nodding, sweating puppet, his greatest threats amount nothing . They saw him commanded and then abandoned.
His mind, trained for political survival, raced through the scenarios. Once these people disembarked from his island and scattered to the four corners of the kingdom, the story would spread.
It would be told in taverns and parlors, in guard posts and merchant halls.
The details would warp and grow with each telling, but the core humiliation would remain,the Marquess had been bested by monsters and a man who commanded them.
He would become a laughingstock, a cautionary tale for the future people. His influence, built on a reputation of ruthless control, would erode like sand before a tide.
He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. There were protocols for silencing witnesses, but this was an entire stadium. He could not imprison or make them disappear. The sheer scale of his failure was its own protection. For the first time in his life, he was utterly, publicly powerless.
Over the next few hours, as the arena was cleared with a hushed, surreal efficiency, his dread solidified. He watched the nobles depart from their private docks, avoiding his eyes, their expressions a mixture of shock and a sly, hidden delight at a rival's downfall.
He saw the merchants whispering in tight clusters as they boarded their ships. He observed the prisoners, the nine remaining veterans, standing together. Their gaze, once weighed down by helpless fury, now held a new, unsettling quality,a spark of witnessed hope.
They had seen their blackmailers power broken. They had heard the command to free them. They were waiting.
For seven days and seven nights, the Marquess lived in a prison of his own making. He had returned to his mansion on the mainland. Its usually a symbol of dominion, felt like a gilded cage. Sleep became a foreign concept. He would doze for an hour, only to jerk awake, his heart hammering, visions of nightmares and orange eyes flashing in the darkness.
He took his meals alone, tasting nothing, jumping at every distant sound that could be the herald of a courier bearing the first satirical broadsheet, the first mocking letter from a rival lord.
He aged visibly. Dark smudges settled permanently under his eyes. His hands, usually steady, developed a faint tremor. The attendants moved through the halls with silent swiftness , fearing the explosion of temper that never quite came, replaced instead by this brittle, watchful silence.
On the morning of the eighth day, something shifted. The oppressive weight of anticipation, having nothing to crash upon, began to lift, grain by grain. No bas news had arrived. No scandalous songs were echoing from the mainland. The silence from the wider world was not accusatory,it was merely… silent.
Exhaustion, delayed and total, finally overwhelmed his frayed nerves. He stumbled to his bed and fell into a sleep so deep and profound it was akin to oblivion.
He slept through the day and into the next night, a solid, uninterrupted fifteen hours,a duration he would have previously declared impossible for a man of his station and vitality.
He awoke not to panic, but to a strange, hollow calm. His body felt heavy, his mind scoured clean.
Bathing and dressing mechanically, he retreated to his study, the room that had been the center of his power. He sat at his great black desk, the morning sun streaming through the window that overlooked his manicured gardens.
The normalcy of the scene,the smell of waxed wood, the pattern of light on the rug was almost offensive in its simplicity.
A hesitant knock came at the door. His chief attendant, a man named Corbin whose face usually wore a mask of professional neutrality, entered. Today, that mask was cracked with confusion.
"My lord, you asked for the morning reports from the main newspapers"Corbin said, placing a sheaf of papers on the desk.
The Marquess's heart, which had begun to settle, gave a single, hard thump. This is it, he thought. The first formal account of his ruin. He kept his voice flat.
"And?"
"It's… peculiar, sir." Corbin cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable.
"The primary news circulating isn't political or economic. There's a rumor. A rather outlandish one, dominating the common talk."
"What rumor?"
The Marquess's fingers tightened on the arms of his chair.
Corbin looked down at his own notes, as if doubting the words.
"It concerns a… a person of mythic proportions. The talks claims a human has emerged with power enough to single handedly shake the foundations of the kingdom"
He couldn't suppress a slight, derisive snort. "Preposterous, of course. The stuff of tales."
The Marquess said nothing. The description hung in the air. Single handedly. He thought of a storm summoned by a name.
"Go on," the Marquess commanded, his voice quiet.
Corbin blinked, surprised by his lord's serious tone.
"Ah, yes. The rumor states this individual is the first in history to have tamed not one, but several mythical beasts. The descriptions from various sources are fragmented, but they seem to coalesce around… well, a creature resembling a giant bee, and another… a living cloud."
He said the last words with palpable embarrassment, as if apologizing for speaking them aloud.
The Marquess felt a bizarre, detached fascination. The world was weaving a story from the madness he had witnessed.
"This… 'leader of beasts" Corbin continued, reading directly now.
"is said to have wielded the fury of the world.Lightning is his chosen weapon, with power described as enough to scour the earth clean.
He is credited with destroying an illegal gladiatorial arena ,a black market and liberating its prisoners."
Corbin paused, his brow furrowed. "The broadsheets and gossip are framing it as a pivotal moment. They are asking
"Is this the new human hero, a savior who will cleanse our rotten kingdom and lead us to a brighter future? Or is he the herald of its final destruction?'"
Corbin finished and looked up, expecting to see dismissal or irritation on his master's face. Instead, he saw an expression he could not decipher. The Marquess was staring past him, out the window, a faint, tremulous smile touching his lips.
The relief that washed through Marquess Valerius was so profound it was dizzying. It was the cool, sweet water after a week in a desert of dread.
Not a single word. Not one mention of him. His name, his title, his humiliation,it had all been swallowed whole by the sheer, blinding spectacle of the other.
He was not the fool in the story. He was not even a character. He was part of the scenery, the anonymous "illegal arena" that was destroyed.
The narrative had vaulted over him entirely, chasing the brighter, more terrifying stars. Skele, the chattering, trembling man he had dismissed, had been transformed into a legendary figure"the leader of the beasts."
The cloud and the bee were now mythic companions. Their confrontation was not a political defeat,it was an epic event, a clash between enormous power and human corruption.
The irony was exquisite. His salvation lay in the very magnitude of the forces that had threatened him. They were too big for the story to be about a noble's shame. They turned it into a saga.
"Thank you, Corbin," the Marquess said, his voice regaining a trace of its old composure.
"You may go."
The attendant, bewildered, bowed and retreated, closing the door softly behind him.
Alone, the Marquess let the full breath escape his lungs. He leaned back in his chair, the first genuine, unburdened motion he'd made in days. He had escaped. Through a bizarre alchemy of public imagination, the disaster had been transfigured. He was not a public criminal.He was a spectator, like everyone else.
But as the initial euphoria faded, a colder, more calculating thought emerged. This rumor, this born legend, was not harmless as it seemed.
Its threat to the "rotten kingdom." It spoke of a hero who destroyed the corrupt .
For now, however, it was a seed that had grown over the graves of his shame. He was safe. He picked up a quill, his hand steady for the first time in a week, and began to draft a letter.
It was time to quietly, very quietly, begin the process of "liberating" certain prisoners and their families. A promise made to a certain cloud.
It seems that it was a promise best kept. Those things could not be allowed to have a reason to look back his way.